


Whumptober 2020 No. 4

by Sapless_Tree



Series: MacGyver Whumptober [4]
Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Angus MacGyver (MacGyver TV 2016) Whump, Gen, Hurt Angus Macgyver (Macgyver 2016), No. 4, Whump, Whumptober 2020, collapsed building, macgyver whump, sfw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26851375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapless_Tree/pseuds/Sapless_Tree
Summary: Whumptober no. 4 "Running Out Of Time"Prompt: collapsed buildingHolding his arm around his chest did nothing to ease the pain; in fact, the pressure hurt more, but the security of having it there made him feel better. Intellectually, he knew it helped nothing, but he couldn’t help but instinctively want to hold his hurting middle.
Relationships: Jack Dalton & Angus MacGyver (MacGyver TV 2016), No Romantic Relationship(s)
Series: MacGyver Whumptober [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1999582
Comments: 9
Kudos: 56
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	Whumptober 2020 No. 4

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, this is late :) school's keeping me busy. I learned how to effectively recognize and handle a person who's having a stroke in my CPR class tho, so that's pretty cool (albeit completely unrelated)

Jack’s ears were ringing. He was coming around slowly, coughing out the dust kicked up from the blast-- a bomb had gone off in the office building he and Mac were in. There hadn’t been enough time to defuse it properly, so the two had to evacuate the building, contain it the best they could, and run like hell. 

Thankfully they’d been quite a few floors up, so the whole building wasn’t going to topple on them within seconds, but that didn’t mean that it was undamaged. The place was crumbling around them and it was only a matter of time before they were in danger of the place _actually_ coming down on top of them.

“Mac?!” Jack called out, getting up from where the explosion had knocked him. He brushed dust and rubble from his jacket and called out for his partner again. Looking over himself, Jack could see some bruising and a few superficial cuts from a nearby broken window, and his head ached. But all in all, he seemed relatively okay.

There was a cough that faded out into a moan from a room or two over.

“Mac that you, bud?” Jack yelled, heading in the direction of the noise. Mac coughed again, throwing a ‘ _yeah,_ ’ to Jack. Something crumbled overhead in the room Jack was exiting-- the few floors above them wouldn’t be able to hold for very long. “All right, stay there. I’m coming to you,” he said, quickly making his way over.

The building was a wreck-- a bomb had gone off in it, there really wasn’t any reason for it not to be a wreck-- but the place was deteriorating all around, rubble crashing to the ground every so often, and the ceiling moaning with the weight of holding the floor up. Relief flooded Jack’s body when he finally caught sight of Mac. 

It flew right back out as he saw the state of his partner.

Mac was lying flat on his back; a large support beam had fallen on his chest, keeping him trapped in place. Mac’s breaths came in short bursts as he was unable to get in a deeper one with the metal crushing his lungs-- the only thing that kept it from crushing him completely was another large pile of smashed-up bits of the building and an unlucky office desk. 

“Oh, God, Mac, are you okay?” Jack asked, rushing over to Mac. Closer to his partner, Jack could see that he seemed dazed, almost disoriented even. There was blood at Mac’s temple, staining the roots of his soft, blond hair with blood. He had much of the same cuts and bruises as Jack, but the bruises were exceptionally darker around the source of blood at his temple-- he must’ve been struck by debris at some point during the explosion.

Mac sucked in another breath, “yeah… I’m okay,” he wheezed. “Help me out?”

Jack wasted no time, grabbing at the boy by the arms (his arms and legs were free, but there wasn’t much he could do with them with his chest held in place by the beam as it was) and trying to pull him out from under the beam. But he was caught underneath it-- Jack wasn’t going to be able to just pull him out. Mac let out an involuntary moan when Jack tried again, pulling harder.

“You’re stuck pretty good there, huh?” Jack said, observing Mac frantically. His little quip seemed to verge on hysterical as the floor above them groaned again.

Mac laughed the best he could, but it came out in more of an erratic staccato of breaths. “Wouldn’t say--” he wheezed again. “Wouldn’t say _good._ ” Something collapsed a few rooms over-- the two could hear it give out and crumble in-- Jack just hoped it wasn’t anything structurally important.

“We need to get you outta here,” Jack said, more to himself than anything else. He grabbed at the support beam, trying to move it with brute-strength and a bit of panic. He wasn’t so lucky with that approach either.

“Jack--” Mac coughed out. “That's not… not gonna work,” he said. He was winded after the statement, struggling to get his breathing back to the semi-normal huffing.

“Tell me you’ve got a plan B ready to go in that big brain of yours?” Jack said.

Mac craned his neck back a bit to try and get a better look at the room. “Just, uh…” Mac blinked a few times as if trying to focus better.

“Mac?”

“Just give me a minute…” He said, trying again to get a better look at the room. A few ceiling tiles fell from above on the other side of the room, some rubble falling with it.

“We don’t really have a minute, Mac,” Jack said, eyeing the debris coming from the ceiling and hearing the building groan louder than before. “I don’t mean to rush you but I need you to--”

“--hurry up?” Mac finished with a grin. He coughed a few times before speaking again. “Is there a pipe or a bar ar-- around?” Mac took a moment to catch his breath. “Something sort of… sort-- sort of long and preferably strong metal,” he clarified airily.

Jack looked around for the desired item, sifting through piles of debris and bits of building. It was all crumbly and broken; Jack was wary some of his movements would take the whole building out. There was a metal pipe in the pile supporting the beam, but pulling it out might’ve made the whole pile collapse and allow the thing to crush Mac’s chest completely.

“There’s nothing like that I can get to,” Jack said after a few minutes of searching. “Just a bunch of pieces of the building and wrecked office stuff.” Mac was quiet for a few moments, thinking mostly, but also trying to chase away the light fog in his mind. Either he needed to breathe properly soon, or it was the blow to the head messing with him-- Mac wasn’t clear which.

“How do the desks look, Jack?” He asked.

“A lot of ‘em fared better than you, bud, I can tell you that much,” Jack said. His joke fell flat, not much amusing either one of them.

“Can you-- can you get to my pocket?” Mac asked, gesturing his arm at the pocket with his swiss army knife in it. “You can saw the… the desk leg. Use that.”

“Yeah, I gotcha,” Jack said. He carefully reached over the heavy beam to Mac’s lower half, pulling the swiss army knife out of his partner’s pocket, flicking the serrated knife open, and sawing the desk's leg off. “I got it off, now what?”

“Now…” Mac started, but he quickly went into a coughing fit. The pile of rubble and smashed desk that the beam rested on had begun to crumble under its weight. It was slowly lowering, compressing Mac’s chest more. 

Mac gasped a few times, eyes blown wide with panic. “Can’t-- I can’t... _Jack--!_ ”

“Hey, hey,” Jack said, gripping Mac’s hand with his free one. “Look at me, Mac. It’s okay-- you’re gonna be fine. You gotta tell me what to do with this, though,” Jack said, desk leg in his other hand. Jack was doing his best to keep himself calm-- for Mac’s sake-- but he was just as terrified as the blond was. “Mac!” Jack said, louder this time, “what do I do?!”

Shakily, Mac pulled his hand from Jack’s and pointed at the support beam on top of him.

“I know-- I know,” Jack said. He didn’t want to be short with Mac, but he was starting to feel pretty useless, helplessly holding an old desk leg as his partner struggled to gasp in whatever air he could get. “Mac, what do I do with this? Come on, man,” he encouraged. “Simplest terms-- let me know how to help.” He was practically begging.

Mac pointed again at the beam. Wheezing a bit harder he forced out: “...lever…” before he was reduced again to a gaspy, shaking mess. But it was enough for Jack to understand what Mac needed. 

Jack wedged the office desk leg underneath the beam near where Mac was and used it as a lever, pushing down hard to get the beam to move. It budged, lifting up off of Mac a few inches-- enough for him to draw in deep, desperate breaths, but not enough to get out. 

The flimsy metal of the desk leg was beginning to bend under the strain, threatening to break. “Hold on kid,” Jack instructed his partner as the desk leg bent further, lowering the beam back all the way onto Mac’s chest. It snapped completely, breaking in half-- part of it in Jack’s hand and the other part still wedged underneath the beam.

Jack eyed the metal pipe from before-- it was still in the pile that had been holding the beam up. 

But the pile was crumbling and Mac couldn’t breathe.

Jack made a decision. 

The older man bolted to the pile, pulling the metal pipe from it and running back over to Mac. Jack’s theory was right-- the support deteriorated much faster without that pipe. In the time that it took Jack to get from the pile back to the blond, the beam had sunk another several inches. Mac wasn’t breathing in at all anymore, merely opening and closing his mouth silently. Jack wasted no time wedging the pipe under the beam as he had done before.

But before he could begin lifting there was a horrible _crack._

The scream that followed would haunt Jack’s nightmares for weeks. It was all the air Mac had left that he’d used to scream when his ribs had cracked under the sheer weight of the massive beam. 

Tears were streaming down Mac’s face as Jack lifted the beam up again. The metal pipe seemed to hold up much better than the desk leg-- allowing Jack to lift the beam up enough to pull Mac out from underneath it.

Mac couldn’t talk, he couldn’t thank Jack-- he could still hardly breathe, It hurt so much-- _why did it have to hurt so bad?_ Mac’s vision was growing spotty even as he let in shuddering breaths. His fractured ribs protested every inhale but his lungs protested the moment he’d tried to breathe slower. He was stuck taking quick and agonizingly shallow breaths. 

“It’s okay, it's okay,” Jack reassured, trying to help Mac stand. The blond’s hands flew around his middle protectively as he hunched forwards with a cry of pain. “Breathe, Mac, breathe.”

Mac did his best to even out his breathing, he really did, but he could only get it so normalized with his ribs cracked and hurting. 

A loud crash caught both of their attention. The support beam broke through the floor completely, picking up momentum and crashing through another few floors before it finally slowed. More wreckage and debris was falling after it, things caving in and collapsing. The place was crumbling around them.

“All right,” Jack said, “we gotta move-- we can’t stay here. Can you walk?” He asked. Mac nodded shakily, not even sure he believed himself. He allowed Jack to take hold around his arm and help guide him as they walked, Mac’s heavy breathing evident the whole way. 

The two were still up several floors in the building-- the elevator was a no-go unless they felt like risking getting trapped or something falling and disconnecting it from its cables (that would send them free-falling in the metal box down an elevator shaft, which didn’t sound ideal). So it was to the stairs they went. 

Carefully, Jack helped Mac as the two made their way down several flights of stairs. Jack almost couldn’t believe their luck with how intact the stairs seemed to have been, but of course, their luck never lasted very long. It was down about six flights of stairs that they finally came upon one that was too wrecked to descend. 

They had to make their way onto that floor and search for another stairwell. Debris was falling freely now, pebbles and dirt and dust coating their hair and face. It was agony when the small rocks had begun to come down on top of them-- it was like walking through hail, but they weren’t numb from the cold that came with a hailstorm.

Mac was breathing a little more freely then, but he still needed to stop every few moments to get through a coughing fit. One particular fit left him too winded to keep walking, and he merely slumped against Jack as his vision grew fuzzy and dark around the edges.

“We got to keep moving, bother,” Jack said, noting that the whole building had begun to groan, not just the few top floors. “You can rest up when we’re out, okay? I promise.”

“Hurts…” Mac mumbled, one hand still wrapped around his middle. Breathing hurt, his ribs and chest hurt, and his head hurt, too. There was a pounding in his skull that he couldn’t quite think past.

“I know,” Jack said sympathetically, “you just keep breathing for me okay? Do you want me to carry you a bit?” Jack offered. He already knew the answer was no, but he’d hoped that maybe Mac was out of it enough that he’d allow Jack to carry him. No such luck.

“I can walk,” Mac said. “Just give… give me a-- a second…” he panted.

The building rumbled threateningly. “No can do, brother. Sorry, we gotta keep moving or we’re gonna get crushed. The whole place is coming down.” As if to emphasize his point, a desk fell through the ceiling off to their left, startling them both. 

Mac nodded, not trusting his voice. The slow-going walk was made even slower as Mac increasingly stopped to breathe and cough. 

Even free from the beam, his chest and lungs still felt horribly constricted and tight. Holding his arm around his chest did nothing to ease the pain; in fact, the pressure hurt more, but the security of having it there made him feel better. Intellectually, he knew it helped nothing, but he couldn’t help but instinctively want to hold his hurting middle. 

The two made their way through the floor, slowly wandering until they could find another staircase to descend. Good luck seemed to favor them again, the rest of the flights of stairs being undamaged enough for them to get down without much more than a few stumbles from Mac. 

Once they got to the ground floor, there was already an ambulance vehicle parked outside. 

“Looks like they were waiting for us huh, Mac?” Jack said, helping Mac to the door of the building. Mac huffed out a laugh but didn’t have time to say anything else. Upon seeing the two, EMTs rushed them, whisking Mac away and letting Jack trail after them like a loyal dog.

**Author's Note:**

> Anyone got any suggestions-- something they'd like to see incorporated into a prompt? There's a lot of whumptober left yet and I'm open-minded about ways to whump Mac/deal with a whumped Mac. 
> 
> Yall want more hurt? More comfort? Both? Like when it's just Mac alone or do you want Jack (or someone else???) there with him? Idk, give me feedback my friends


End file.
